Sunday, June 18, 2006

ConsimWorld Expo, Part 2 of 3 - EastFront

Having gotten my fill of EuroFront on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I split off on Friday afternoon to play a good, old-fashioned game of straight EastFront. When I play one of the Front games at home, what I'd usually do is play a 6-month scenario – I like Summer '42, Winter '42, and Summer '43, about in that order. These are pretty manageable to play (4 hours or so), are fairly well-balanced, and are all good situations which present both sides with interesting opportunities. They also tend to be pretty stable, in that barring all but the most egregious errors, an interesting game should result.

But this is MonsterCon and time to try something different. In casual play, I've always avoided the Summer '41 scenario, the initial invasion of Russia, because it's so unbalanced. By this, I mean that the Germans are brutalizing the Soviet armies, and the Soviets will win by escaping complete catastrophe. This just doesn't seem that appealing. But I've now played enough EastFront that the fact that I had never (before yesterday) played Summer '41 seemed like a hole in my experience of the game, and if you want to play EuroFront in all its grandeur, you need to how to deal with that initial invasion. So we played EastFront starting in Summer '41, and instead of just playing 6 months, we decided to go until a decision was reached one way or the other.

I ended up enjoying the '41 scenario more than I expected. It is a much more exacting game than the later scenarios – forgetting to cover a critical hex two spaces behind the front lines can have bad consequences for the Soviets – but it's not as unforgiving as, say, The Russian Campaign. There is a substantial tactical element, but it's not as hyper-tactical as most hex-n-counter games. Heck, it's not even as hyper-tactical as Caylus. It's still mostly about picking your spots, making sure your headquarters are in the right place at the right time, and using your rail capabilities to get your critical units (tanks and shock armies) where they are needed.

Still, that said, Summer '41 is still largely driven by the Germans. They will pick objectives (Leningrad, Moscow, the Ukraine) and try to take them. The Soviets will desperately try to oppose them where possible, but mostly just try not to get wiped out. But when you link Summer '41 to Winter '41, things get interesting, because in Winter, the Germans are hosed. In Winter '41, the Germans are especially hosed. Their headquarters are all disrupted and cost extra to build, all their units are slowed to the speed of tanks in mud, and their offensive capabilities are near-zero. Meanwhile, the Soviets are virtually unaffected, and receive an influx of fully-built Shock Armies. For all the abuse the Germans dished out during the Summer, they are now set for a hammering. I'm not sure I'd play either Summer '41 or Winter '41 as a standalone, but as a pair, I think they have a nice symmetry, and were pretty entertaining.

In the event, the Germans weren't able to make decisive progress in '41, and the winter counter-attack was pretty brutal – not in terms of ground, but in terms of casualties. My big lesson learned was that, as the Germans, nothing you can do in '41 will be worth it if your tank arm gets mauled. Make sure to keep them safe and mobile over the winter, which means not letting them get tied down in battles. You need to be inflicting enough casualties on the Soviets to keep them off-balance in '42, but you can't do that at the cost of suffering too many casualties yourself. Those 70-ish production points won't go nearly as far as it looked like they would from the safety of Poland, and you cannot afford massive tank replacements.

We called it a game in Summer '43, when things had cascaded to make things very rough on the Germans. Playing the long game was cool, but in future, I'd recommend using the standard semi-annual scenarios as checkpoints. Each six-month season has a handicap, and you can see who is winning at that point. If one player is ahead by, say, 10 points, I think it's time to call it and move on to another game. EastFront is a game where small advantages accrue from season to season to become big advantages, and if you start '43 significantly behind the historical pace, it's going to be exceptionally hard to win. So rather than sitting down and deciding to play the "whole war", I think checking every 6 months of every year against the victory conditions until someone gets ahead makes a lot more sense.

Anyway, the Front games remain amongst my very favorites, and playing them intensively for 4 days mainly made me want to get them out more regularly.